Law Students Lose the Grant Game as Schools Win

LIKE a lot of other college seniors, Alexandra Leumer got her introduction to the heady and hazardous world of law school scholarships in the form of a letter bearing very good news. The Golden Gate University School of Law in San Francisco had admitted her, the letter stated, and it had awarded her a merit scholarship of $30,000 a year — enough to cover the full cost of tuition.

To keep her grant, all that Ms. Leumer had to do was maintain a grade-point average of 3.0 or above — a B or better. If she dipped below that number at the end of either the first or the second year, the letter explained, she would lose her scholarship for good.

“I didn’t give it much thought,” she said. “I didn’t think it would be a challenge.”

Her grades and test scores were well above the median at Golden Gate, which then languished in the bottom 25 percent of the U.S. News and World Report annual rankings of law schools.

How hard could a 3.0 be? Really hard, it turned out. That might have been obvious if Golden Gate published a statistic that law schools are loath to share: the number of first-year students who lose their merit scholarships. That figure is not in the literature sent to prospective Golden Gate students or on its Web site.

But it’s a number worth knowing. At Golden Gate and other law schools nationwide, students are graded on a curve, which carefully rations the number of A’s and B’s, as well as C’s and D’s, awarded each semester. That all but ensures that a certain number of students — at Golden Gate, it could be in the realm of 70 students this year — will lose their scholarships and wind up paying full tuition in their second and third years.

The short answer is this: to build the best class that money can buy, and with it, prestige. But these grant programs often succeed at the expense of students, who in many cases figure out the perils of the merit scholarship game far too late.

On the Golden Gate campus recently, a group of first-year students at risk of losing their scholarships were trying to make sense of the system. Most declined to be identified for this article because criticizing the school seemed, at minimum, undiplomatic. But the phrase “bait and switch” came up a lot. Several assumed that they were given what is essentially a discount to get them in the door.

“I had a friend once who told me that hunting is a sport,” said one Golden Gate merit grant winner who anticipated coming up shy of a 3.0 average. “I said, ‘Hunting is not a sport.’ He said: ‘Sure it’s a sport. It’s just that the animals don’t know they’re in a game.’ That’s what it feels like to be a law student these days. You have no idea you’re in a game.”

The school’s dean, Drucilla Stender Ramey, declined to say exactly how many students would lose their scholarships this year, suggesting that doing so would violate the privacy rights of the students. She acknowledged, though, that lost merit scholarships have been the source of much campus misery.

“Of course some students are disappointed,” she said. “I thought I’d be 5-foot-10, and I’m 4-11. But if you gave students sodium pentothal,” also known as the truth serum, “they’d say, ‘This is a new and very difficult undertaking, the school will support me as best they can and, hopefully, with hard work and good luck, I’ll be able to retain my scholarship.’”

Nobody knows exactly how many law school students nationwide lose scholarships each year — no oversight body tallies that figure — but what’s clear is that American law schools have quietly gone on a giveaway binge in the last decade. In 2009, the most recent year for which the American Bar Association has data, 38,000 of 145,000 law school students — more than one in four — were on merit scholarships. The total tab for all schools in all three years: more than $500 million.

It’s a huge sum, particularly when you realize that merit scholarships were exceptionally rare at law schools a mere generation ago. But given that many students lose their grants after the first year, the question is this: What exactly are law schools buying with all of that money?

JERRY ORGAN, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, has been one of the few academics to study law school merit scholarships. Six years ago, after a conversation with the school’s director of admissions, Professor Organ learned that the number of applicants weighing merit scholarship offers had soared since his days as an applicant in the early 1980s.

“I’m from a middle-class family, and I couldn’t ask my parents for tens of thousands of dollars to pay for law school,” he said. “So, in the days before the Internet, I read through lots of law school brochures and discovered that just a handful offered merit scholarships.”

The difference between the early ’80s and today, he concluded, can be summed up in one name: U.S. News, which began ranking law schools in 1987.

If it sounds absurd that America’s legal education system could be whipsawed by, of all things, U.S. News, you have yet to grasp the law school fixation with rankings. Unlike undergraduate colleges, law schools share far more similarities than differences, particularly in the first-year curriculum.

So a lot of schools regard the rankings as their best chance to establish a place in the educational hierarchy, which has implications for the quality of students that apply, the caliber of law firms that come to recruit, and more. Striving for a high U.S. News ranking consumes the bulk of the marketing budget of a vast number of schools.

Which is where scholarships come in.

The algorithm used by U.S. News puts a heavy emphasis on college grade-point averages and Law School Admission Test scores. Together, those two numbers determine about 22 percent of a school’s ranking. The bar passage rate, which correlates strongly with undergraduate G.P.A.’s and LSAT scores, is worth an additional two points in the algorithm. In short, students’ academic credentials determine close to a quarter of a school’s rank — the largest factor that schools can directly control.

So the point of most merit scholarship programs, Professor Organ said, isn’t merely to tempt prospective students who might otherwise not attend, though that clearly is one result.

“What law schools are buying is higher G.P.A.’s and LSATs,” Professor Organ said. In other words, the schools are buying smarter students to enhance their cachet and rise in the rankings.

The University of Florida’s law school requires students to maintain a 3.2 G.P.A. to keep their scholarships; at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in Manhattan, it’s a 2.95. The Chicago-Kent College of Law has a number of grant offerings, one of which sounds like the refueling options for a rental car: students can get a $9,000 annual scholarship guaranteed for all three years, no matter what their G.P.A., or $15,000 a year on the condition that they earn a 3.25 or above. If they get between a 3.0 and 3.25, they keep half the scholarship. Below a 3.0, it’s gone.

Some elite schools don’t give any merit scholarships, and some give them conditioned only on maintaining good academic standing — which translates to “don’t flunk out.” But merit stipulations — or stips, as they are known by students — are used by 80 percent of law schools for which information is publicly available, Professor Organ found.

And it’s not just institutions in the bottom half of the U.S. News rankings. If your school is ranked 35th, perhaps you’re gunning for No. 30 and you can see No. 40 creeping up in the rear-view mirror.

Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with incentives that ask students to earn strong grades in exchange for a break on tuition. But given that students are often shocked when their scholarships disappear, there are some basic questions about good faith and full disclosure here — an irony, given that those topics are covered in law school.

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Jerry Organ, of the University of St. Thomas law school, says many schools use merit grant programs to climb the rankings in U.S. News & World Report.Credit
Craig Lassig for The New York Times

Catering to the U.S. News rankings also has “strange and unintended consequences,” says Thomas F. Guernsey, dean of the Albany Law School.

To him, the strangest is that the bulk of law schools skimp on aid to students who can least afford tuition. The number of need-based scholarships has actually shrunk in the last five years, according to A.B.A. figures, to 18,000 from 20,000 five years ago.

Mr. Guernsey said he’d like to scrap Albany’s system and give money away in the third year, based on the student’s ability to pay off loans. “But if I moved money to loan repayment assistance,” he said, “I wouldn’t have the money to give to applicants for scholarships coming in, which is likely to mean that the best applicants will go somewhere else.”

Another consequence of merit mania: a lot of heartache and anxiety. After fall semester exams, it dawns on thousands of 1L’s, as first-year law students are known, that their financial future is about to change dramatically for the worse.

As realities set in, many are irate. Others, like Ms. Leumer, who graduated from Golden Gate in 2009, feel snookered.

“By the middle of second semester of that first year, everyone saw the system for what it was,” she said. “We were furious. We realized that statistically, because of the curve, there was no way for many of us to keep our scholarships. But at that point, you’re a year in. They’ve got you. You feel stuck.”

GOLDEN GATE LAW was founded in 1901, and sits today in a modern building of concrete and brick in the city’s Financial District, not far from Fisherman’s Wharf. Six years ago, the school attracted some unflattering attention when the A.B.A., which accredits law schools, put it on two-year probation. One reason was that the percentage of graduates who passed the bar on their first attempt, at just over 30 percent, was too low.

Ms. Ramey, who became dean in 2009, said the probation did nothing to affect the number or size of scholarship offers. But in 2006, Ms. Leumer quickly realized that she was surrounded by dozens of students just as motivated to get a 3.0 as she was. Concern turned into worry when, in her first semester, her grades included a B-minus in torts and a B-minus in contracts.

Translated numerically, she had a 2.786.

“I felt like I was getting used to a new form of testing,” she recalls, “and had to just get more efficient at studying.”

In the second semester, she raised her grades in almost every class, except one. She ended the year with a 2.967. In the parlance of 1L’s, she had “curved out.”

By then, Ms. Leumer had a serious case of scholarship remorse. Her goal had been to get a law diploma without taking out huge loans, but as the first year ended, she was looking at a $60,000 bill for the next two years of tuition.

A friend and classmate, Rachael Welden-Smith, wound up with a 2.9 in the first year, and, with that number, a deep sense of regret. The previous year, she’d been accepted and sent a deposit to a higher-ranked law school, but she chose Golden Gate when it offered to cover half her tuition with a merit grant.

“At the time,” Ms. Welden-Smith said, “I didn’t think of the law school as a business.”

What both women realized too late is that it’s often mathematically impossible for everyone to keep their grants. This year at Golden Gate, for instance, 57 percent of first-year students — more than 150 in a class of 268 — have merit scholarships. But in recent years, only the top third of students at Golden Gate wound up with a 3.0 or better, according to Ms. Ramey, the dean. If past patterns hold, dozens of first-year Golden Gate scholarships are about to vanish.

Ms. Ramey says it is statistically possible for 70 percent of first-year students to maintain a 3.0. She also maintains that Golden Gate 1L’s are well informed about the odds they face in keeping scholarships.

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“Students who have done well in college assume they will do well in law school,” she said. They would know better “if they read our materials, if they listen to anything we told them in our admission process, or read our course catalog.”

Actually, it takes a bit of forensic accounting to figure out how hard it is to keep a 3.0 at Golden Gate. Knowing the G.P.A. that a school expects of its merit winners says little unless you also know where it sets its curve — essentially, its median grade. A 3.0 at a school where the median is 2.6 is a lot harder to achieve than at a school where it’s 2.8.

It also helps to know how many others in a given class have the same offer — information that Golden Gate, like many schools, puts on its Web site but not in its congratulations letters.

Students who don’t seek out this data tend to regard merit scholarship offers as a school saying “We love you.” It’s more like an invitation to a foot race, and before you get to the starting line you’d better know how fast to run and how many others are running.

“I went online and found a standard deviation calculator,” said one Golden Gate 1L, explaining what he did to size up the difficulty of achieving a 3.0. Then he taught himself how to use that calculator. He entered data from the school’s student handbook, which includes a table with details like the maximum and minimum percentage of A’s, B’s, C’s and D’s that a professor can award in a given class.

“The school puts the information on the top shelf,” said Cassady Toles, another Golden Gate 1L, “but there is a ladder in the room.”

Many schools, it seems, expect students to find the ladder. The Wayne State University Law School in Detroit tells merit scholarship winners in congratulations letters that they will need a 3.25 G.P.A. to keep their grants, worth nearly $25,000 a year. That means students need to wind up in the top third of their class. But that information isn’t in the letter.

“It’s not that we couldn’t include it,” said Ericka Jackson, assistant dean of admissions. “We are always looking for ways to improve communications with students, and that is an easy fix.”

Then again, disclosing exactly how hard it is to get a 3.25 could diminish Wayne State’s appeal to students the school wants most, which could have real repercussions. So many schools are packed so tightly together in the U.S. News rankings that even minuscule gains and losses have an impact.

In the most recent U.S. News rankings, released in March, the median LSAT score at Baylor Law School in Waco, Tex., stood at 162, up two points from the previous year. But that small uptick is part of the reason the school rose to No. 56 in the rankings — up eight spots on the list of 190

How many of Baylor’s 1L’s are on merit scholarships? Ninety percent, according to David Swenson, a professor who helped design Baylor’s grant program. Given the G.P.A. requirements, he added, 8 out of 10 of those students can expect to keep the money next year.

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Alexandra Leumer accepted a full-ride grant to law school, not knowing the likelihood that it would be rescinded.Credit
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

“It was an accident,” said Professor Swenson, when asked why the school offered more scholarships this year than it is likely to renew. A greater number of 1L’s than expected enrolled at Baylor last fall, he explained, making it the largest class in the school’s history.

IN the world of law school deans, U.S. News plays roughly the same role as the final standings in Major League Baseball — rise and you’re golden, sink and you’re fretting. The dark comedy in all of this is that many deans consider the rankings to be absurd. They know that schools’ reputations don’t change much in a given year, and that the U.S. News algorithm can amplify tiny vibrations into quakes.

But as much as academics bemoan the algorithm, it has an audience that can’t be ignored, comprising students, lawyers, judges, university presidents and parents.

A lot of parents.

“I remember when I was at Northwestern, a mother called me because her son was deciding between law school at Emory and Boston University,” said Rayman L. Solomon, now the dean of Rutgers School of Law at Camden. “He wanted to go to B.U., which was a couple spots behind Emory, because he wanted to live in Boston, not Atlanta. And she was convinced that he was throwing his life away.”

Faith in the meaning of the rankings all but forces a school to offer merit scholarships. Every fall, admissions offices and applicants begin an immense, multilayered haggle that resembles nothing so much as a bustling souk. Aspiring 1L’s shop for the best combination of money and prestige, and schools dangle acceptance letters and dollars.

As common as G.P.A. requirements are, they often barely register in applicants’ deliberations. The very human tendency to overestimate one’s talents is part of the problem. Like the children of Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Wobegon, all incoming 1L’s seem to believe that they are above average.

Consider what happens at Chicago-Kent, the school that offers students less scholarship money ($9,000) if they want it guaranteed, and more ($15,000) if they can clear the 3.25 G.P.A. hurdle. Ninety percent opt for the larger and riskier sum, according to school officials. A “significant” number later lose their scholarships, says the school’s dean, Harold J. Krent.

“The real issue is that students don’t think about this decision in the sophisticated way that you’d like them to,” he added. “A lot of students think, ‘Well, worst comes to worst, I’ll borrow the money,’ without realizing how painful it is to pay that money back over time.”

Credit Chicago-Kent with forcing students to consider a trade-off, at least for a moment. Other schools phrase their scholarship offers in lump-sum terms that seem to encourage wishful thinking.

“The maximum value of your merit scholarship is $105,914 over the course of your three years of full-time study,” read an offer from the George Washington University Law School. A few paragraphs later, it said “as long as you maintain a 3.0 cumulative G.P.A.”

Officials at George Washington said they would not discuss their scholarship program.

Combine the optimism of students and the enticing language of law schools, then toss in the curve, and an inevitable result is legions of irate and disappointed 1L’s.

“Some students would show up crying; others would throw things,” says Jennifer Wright, a professor at St. Thomas, recalling her time teaching at a school with competitive merit scholarships, the name of which she asked not to be used in this article. “I had a lot of stuff on my desk. When they wanted to throw something I’d tell them, ‘Use the bean bag, not the paperweight.’ ”

POPULAR student mythology has it that the A.B.A. requires law schools to grade them on a curve. Not so. But by loading up 1L’s with curved classes, Golden Gate and other schools all but ensure that the first year of law school is far more difficult than the two that follow. Which is another way of saying that for many merit grant winners, law school becomes easier, but only after it is too late.

Ms. Leumer’s experience is typical. She took few classes that were graded on a curve in Years 2 and 3, and her grades kept improving. Her cumulative G.P.A. for all three years was 3.14.

Her parents chipped in to help with tuition but used money the couple badly needed; her father, a Teamster who drove a tractor at a horse track, had been laid off.

“It was a strain,” said Ann Robertson, Alexandra’s mother and a philosophy teacher at San Francisco State University. “And we weren’t able to help 100 percent.”

Several current Golden Gate students who arrived on merit scholarships say they expect to owe more than $100,000 if — the more pessimistic say “when” — they lose the grants. Tuition is now more than $38,000 a year. Because money is also needed for rent, food and books, the bills climb from there.

These students will scramble for loans as law schools suffer through what looks increasingly like a public relations debacle.

A lot of livid graduates and some slightly mortified professors have lately been contending that law schools are misleading prospective students about the marketability of a doctor of jurisprudence.

But the A.B.A. seems unaware of the issues raised by merit grants. Its annual survey of law schools is granular enough to ask for the number of hours the library is open, but it doesn’t ask how many students lose their scholarships each year.

“That is a good question, a legitimate question,” said Bucky Askew, who directs the A.B.A. division that accredits schools. “It hasn’t been an issue brought to our attention. Nobody has written us, contacted us, to say, ‘This needs to be on the table.’ ”

Why is merit scholarship retention not part of the U.S. News data haul? “The main reason is that we haven’t thought about it,” said Robert Morse, who oversees the rankings. “It’s not a great answer, but it’s an honest answer.”

Then Mr. Morse thought about it.

“This isn’t meant to be sarcastic,” he said, “but these students are going to law school and they need to learn to read the fine print.”

In a forthcoming paper, Professor Organ proposes a simple system of greater disclosure that, among other figures, would detail the number and percentage of students on scholarships in all three years. Reducing lost-scholarship sticker shock, he suggests, could serve schools’ long-term interests. Alumni who feel that they were on the losing end of a raw deal are less likely to send donations. Ms. Leumer, for instance, hears from Golden Gate now and then, asking her for money.

“Many times, I’ve drafted my response in my head,” she says.

Suffice it to say, the response does not include a donation. But in one crucial way, Ms. Leumer contributed to Golden Gate the day she passed the California bar on her first try. Thanks in part to all those merit grants, the school’s bar passage rate has been rising in recent years and is now roughly double the level when it was on probation.

Ms. Leumer today is volunteering at an environmental nonprofit organization as she looks for a paying job in a gruesome recession in the legal market. She has some warm memories of her years at Golden Gate, but ultimately, she says, the place did not work for her. But by spending $60,000 on tuition, and by helping to bolster a key statistic, she worked for Golden Gate.